I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.

The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, but because you're not making as much profit as the stock market thinks you should, and therefore your shares are "underperforming".

I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.

No one wants to be the one to ring the "we're in a recession" bell first

The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...

The pandemic over hiring that ended 4 years ago?

They are opportunistic. They are using it as a scapegoat to lay off people they over-hired for for the growth they had during COVID. They are also using it as a scapegoat to offshore more and more labor.

The only way AI recoups the investment is if it replaces all our jobs.

It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.

You take a non working technology and threaten workers with it as part of a global scheme to depress wages, and hey, bonus, the technology probably appears smart because it just wantonly steals everyone else's work and then passes it off as it's own.

How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?

It wouldn't exist.

Who would buy this?

Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?

The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.

Another part of the problem is our lax regulatory "anything goes" environment which puts no guardrails on how AI can be used / abused. For example, eventually nearly everyone needs healthcare, and the idea you might be denied by AI or fighting AI to get a claim accepted is unpopular.